Authors: Alberto Giubilini (philosophy), Caesar Atuire (philosophy), Sloan Mahone (history), Ann Kelly (anthropology), Tolulope Osayomi (medical geography)
Report of the Medical Humanities workshop held on 7th November 2025 at the University of Oxford
This interdisciplinary workshop wanted to explore the contribution that the humanities can make to global health, and indeed emphasize their necessary role in it.
Why this aim? Global health is typically defined in terms of ‘equitable’ approaches to health worldwide. However, equity has different ethical, political, cultural, and historical connotations. Some understandings of equity might not even be compatible with some of the values and principles that a ‘global’ terminology seems to presuppose. For instance, among other things, equity requires balancing one’s local or national interests with the health interests of other communities around the world. What issues are a matter of global responsibility in this sense is itself an ethical and political choice. Different understandings of equity would give different answers. Moreover, discrimination or stigmatization, inevitably tied to cultures and histories, affect differently what counts as equitable within different contexts.
Defining global health in terms of ‘equity’ raises more questions than it provides answers on the very nature and scope of global health. Turning on ethical, political, and cultural values, such questions illustrate why the humanities can play a central role in global health. This workshop brought together expertise from philosophy, medical geography, history, and anthropology to unpack these questions.
Anthropologist Ann Kelly’s work on efforts to tackle malaria identified two main approaches to it. The former, exemplified for instance by the philosophy of the Effective Altruism movement, is based on optimising costs by maximizing the number of lives saved per dollar, particularly through “technological fixes” such as insecticide-treated bed nets. The latter is centred on a broader range of considerations and, within Ann’s work, finds its application in the study of how houses are built in regions affected by the disease. The “Humble Brick” project she leads acknowledges the frustration of interventions aimed at just one dimension of utility (saving the greatest number of lives), without producing life improvements for those most affected. It focuses on structures and materials used for houses that can not only keep mosquitos at bay, but also be responsive to cultural and ethical sensitivities around the concept of home. That is, a place of comfort with a moral and cultural connotation.
Thus, a utilitarian notion of equity is contrasted with a notion of equity based on a broader range of values which define the meaning of ‘home’ in a specific cultural context. While the former might make sense from a Western, economic-focused, perspective, it doesn’t necessarily track a sense of equity acceptable for the targeted populations. These types of considerations make the relevance of medical geography for global health apparent. Medical geographer Tolulope Osayomi’s provided two main reasons for why his discipline should play such central role. First, inevitably, “where you live affects your health”. Second, local events connect to global processes. Importantly for the present discussion, that relationship also affects the interpretation of health and the priority given to it within a certain system of values. In other words, human-space interactions shape cultural understandings of health. Thus, equity in a geographical sense is conceptualised as territorial/spatial justice, understood as distribution of resources in proportion to need. One challenge is how to identify and measure the relevant “need”, which again largely depends on different historical and cultural contexts.
Equally, local contexts determine what counts as stigma and discrimination. Historian Sloan Mahone emphasized the specific and complex relationship between epilepsy and the ways in which deeply held culturally specific beliefs and myths greatly impact the illness experience. In particular, her talk described the development of an oral history repository for global epilepsy (covering parts of Africa, India and Brazil) to be housed at the new Centre for Global Epilepsy at Wolfson College. This oral history project seeks to ensure the inclusion of lived experience as a way of addressing concerns about equity related to highly stigmatized conditions particularly when there is a severe treatment gap.
All this suggests that, alongside issues of equity at the international level, there are issues of equity arising within the local communities on which global health efforts focus. How to formulate a notion of equity that can manage the tension between the local and the global is a challenge for global health. Philosopher Caesar Atuire focused on the philosophical foundations of the concept of solidarity, which he sees as the ‘fuel’ of equity and as one of the central principles of global health. Solidarity, on his view, allows us to identify with the populations living far away from us and typically targeted by global health action. Among other things, solidarity allows us to see the world from the perspective of those living outside our immediate circles of concerns, that is, our family, our community, or our nation states. By incorporating a notion of justice, solidarity both justifies and motivates our push towards equity in a global context, in a way that takes into account the perspective of those affected.
All in all, the workshop moved some steps towards blending theoretical and practical considerations into a unified humanities approach. The plan is now to develop “A Humanities Framework in Global Health”, the theme of the project within which this event took place. The project is funded by the John Fell Fund via a TORCH International Fellowship to host Dr Tolulope Osayomi (University of Ibadan) at the Uehiro Oxford Institute during Michaelmas 2025.